MIT Press
Chapter Title: California Agriculture and Conventional Food
Book Title: California Cuisine and Just Food
Book Author(s): Sally K. Fairfax, Louise Nelson Dyble, Greig Tor Guthey, Lauren Gwin,
Monica Moore, Jennifer Sokolove, Matthew Gerhart and Jennifer Kao
Published by: MIT Press. (2012)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhm2k.9
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Cuisine and Just Food
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3
California Agriculture and Conventional
Food
Why alternative food? Alternative to what? This chapter describes the
conventional side of the food system. The basic story is broadly familiar,
and we do not reiterate the abundant literature.1 Instead we focus on
background relevant to our arguments about alternative food. Because
we define alternative as sustainable, healthy, and just, we need to suggest
how conventional food, that is, the food most people eat every day,
became unsustainable, unjust, and unhealthy. Because justice has been
central in the district over the past decade and is likely to remain so, we
emphasize connections between the evolving conventional food system
and the struggle for civil and human rights in California and U.S. history.
We begin by arguing, not without precedent, that the way of producing food that is conventional across the United States, and indeed much
of the rest of the world today, originated in California. Many of the
state’s characteristic patterns—specialty crops, large landholdings, and
exploited labor—were in clear view during the mission period (late 1760s
to mid-1830s). Subsequently, investment following the Gold Rush
(1848–1855), construction of the railroads, and significant government
subsidies facilitated the creation and distribution of California fruits and
vegetables around the world. With such a heavily capitalized and statesupported agriculture, the Jeffersonian vision of hardy, independent
yeomen farmers did not apply in California.
We then take a selective look at the complicated period from World
War I to the early 1950s. The standard Depression-era narrative reasonably focuses on government action, which we regard as critical in creating an increasingly integrated national food system based on the
California model. But in some key areas, Congress acted by not acting
or by exempting agriculture from regulation; at a time when it was
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Chapter 3
effectively managing commodity markets, for example, Congress did not
extend basic protections to agricultural workers. That reinforced and
spread nationwide the exploitative elements of the California approach
to labor. Changes in the private sector starting in the 1930s were probably as important as government programs (and inaction) in shaping and
nationalizing the conventional model. The growth in grocery stores and
supermarkets was a major factor driving consolidation and nationalization of the food system. Californians’ beloved automobiles filled suburban parking lots with grocery shoppers who led Americans’ rush toward
new kinds of ever more processed and convenient food.
Finally, we point to the public health and environmental threats of the
“get big or get out” period. Up to the 1950s, it is easy to see the injustices
in the food system and many increasingly unsustainable elements, but
we have found little evidence that food was reliably bad or bad for you.2
After World War II, cheap oil and chemical pesticides intensified every
aspect of the system, degrading food quality in the process. We present
the “green revolution” as a tragic misnomer: there is little about it that
was green as we now use that term. The green revolution underwrote
the round of federal policies in the 1970s that were intended to drive
small family farmers off their land. Those hardy yeomen, on whom our
core agricultural myths rest, were almost as clearly victims of the system
as were the workers in the fields.
From the Missions to World War I
The Emergence of the Conventional Model in California
Analysts of every political stripe and priority note California’s remarkable natural resources. Carey McWilliams, for example, wrote in the
1930s that the state’s agriculture reflects its “amazing range of environmental factors . . . California has the highest peaks, the lowest valleys,
the driest desert, and some of the rainiest sections of the United States.”3
The Sierra mountains, which trace the state’s eastern border, and a
number of mountain ranges running parallel to the Pacific coast, create
hundreds of soil types and microclimates. These mountains encircle the
Central Valley, which is the heart of agriculture in California. Extending
north nearly to Oregon and south beyond Bakersfield, the valley includes
an exceptionally fertile band of farmland and pasture that produces
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
37
Figure 3.1
California Agricultural Land. California’s diverse microclimates have enabled
production of an equally diverse array of crops. The state’s principal agricultural
region, the Central Valley, is formed by the Sierra Nevada and coastal mountains.
An extensive irrigation system brings water south and west to the state’s
agricultural lands. Source: California Department of Conservation Farmland
Mapping and Monitoring Program.
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Chapter 3
amazingly huge array of crops. Boosters and land speculators, past and
present, have trumpeted California’s incredible ecological and agricultural diversity:4
The state accounts for nearly the entire U.S. production of walnuts, almonds,
nectarines, olives, dates, figs, pomegranates, and persimmons. It leads the nation
in the production of vegetables, including lettuce, tomatoes, broccoli, celery,
cauliflower, carrots, lima beans, and spinach, and also of apricots, grapes, lemons,
strawberries, plums and prunes, peaches, cantaloupes, avocados, and honeydew
melons. It is the nation’s leading producer of hay and the second leading producer
of cotton. California is also the second ranking state in the production of rice,
oranges, tangerines, grapefruit, apples, pears, sweet corn, and asparagus.5
However, McWilliams also noted that California’s natural bounty
only “set the table for everything else to follow,” and that human overlay
has been decisive. The most impressive intervention has addressed the
major flaw in the state’s magnificent environment: water is not where
the inhabitants have wished it to be. Economic, political, and cultural
institutions have allowed Californians to reorganize the environment,
building a vast infrastructure to produce and distribute food, and the
reorganization of the waterscape has been particularly intense. Native
Americans moved water to meet their modest needs.6 The Spanish built
aqueducts to bring water to the missions.7 However, federal and state
governments worked far more extensively and expensively to move water
from north to south, across state lines and westward from the Colorado
River. Both farms and people followed water, ending the Bay Area’s brief
role as the state’s major agricultural producer.8 Although growth in San
Francisco and its suburbs required one of the more deeply contested
water diversions in the nation’s history, Yosemite National Park’s Hetch
Hetchy dam, the Bay Area’s generally low soil quality never justified
importing water for row crops.9
Innovative Californians reorganized more than the waterscape. Agriculture was at the heart of Spanish California, and the mission period
inscribed three critical patterns that shape the organization of California’s agriculture even today.10 First, the missions encouraged the accumulation of vast stretches of land by single owners, establishing a pattern
that continued under the Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. land grant systems.
Although small producers have always played a role in the state’s agricultural economy, large holdings have been the political and economic
drivers and have accounted for most of the output. Second, Franciscan
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
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priests relied on the same exploitation of racially distinct labor that
continues today. Franciscans “converted” Indians, who became agricultural laborers, and Mexican and subsequent American landowners
enslaved them. Similar race-based practices persisted even as the origins
and identities of California growers and workers changed over time.
Third, the Franciscans imported livestock and wheat that seeded the
ranches of both the Californios and the Americans who succeeded them.
They planted many of the European fruits, vegetables, grapes, and olives
that became the backbone of the state’s diverse horticulture.
Financing “Factories in the Field”
Mission-era landholding, labor, and cropping patterns were in place
when the Gold Rush both created demand for food and provided capital
for developing the industry. Initially a market in basics like wheat and
beef boomed. The expanding population pushed local game species to
extinction in the 1850s and the cost of driving meat from Arizona and
New Mexico raised prices as much as thirty-fold.11 Combined with the
disposition of Spanish, Indian, and public domain lands this enabled the
large-scale, fantastically profitable bonanza ranching that dominated
California agriculture after the Gold Rush. The ranches grew to supply
not only the miners but also national and international wheat, beef, and
mutton markets.
Many institutions and individuals, financiers, railroads, banks, and
both successful and disappointed miners, fueled that first rush of capitalintensive agriculture. New mining fortunes as well as East Coast and
European banks provided investment capital, abetted by an increasingly
sophisticated and more integrated regional financial system.12 As San
Francisco became the first financial center in the western United States,
agriculture became one of the most attractive sectors for investment.
California farms in 1850 averaged about 4,465 acres compared to a U.S.
average of about 202.5 acres.
Although the enormous holdings amassed by California’s land barons,
including the Henry Miller and Charles Lux empire, did not last and the
differential declined, the state’s farms remained above the U.S. average
until the 1980s. In the 1870s, investment in more intensive and scientific
practices began to shift the California industry away from beef and
wheat toward labor- and capital-intensive specialty crops such as wine
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Chapter 3
grapes, citrus, vegetables, and nuts.13 Many large holdings were subdivided and sold, but large holdings did not disappear. Indeed, in many
areas and for extensive uses in particular, land consolidation continued.
Although the dominance of vast, monopolistic agricultural holdings
waned, its large scale remains one of the distinguishing characteristics of
conventional California agriculture.14
While the banks were critical to the development of large-scale,
intensive California agriculture, railroads played an important and unexpectedly varied role. Following the hurried completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, improved distribution systems shaped the
state’s aspirations. California’s enormous wheat farms supplied national
and international markets for more than thirty years. One-third of the
state’s grain flowed into Liverpool or Hong Kong at wheat’s nineteenth-century peak.15 Closer to home, rails provided quick access to
urban markets around the country for the state’s growing bounty of
fresh fruits and vegetables. Nonetheless, railroad agents also consciously
created their own customers; they actively promoted immigration, lent
capital, sold land, and funded irrigation and infrastructure. Railroad
promoters invested in large and small operations alike, contributing
to the development of communities as well as to massive agricultural
enterprises.
The Requirement for Cheap Labor
When land is made expensive by anticipation of profits based on cheap
labor, the cost of labor has to remain low if land is to maintain its value
or, better yet, appreciate.16 Certainly both land speculation and the prospects for large-scale production drove California’s steadily ascending
land prices, but the state’s commitment to maintaining cheap agricultural
labor was at least as critical.
Prior to statehood, California growers accustomed to the slavery that
had sustained mission agriculture flirted with joining the Confederacy.
After California was admitted to the Union as a free soil state, the legislature explicitly invited continuing enslavement of Indians. The 1850
Act for the Government and Protection of Indians allowed whites to
“obtain control of Indian children” and to purchase at auction Indians
who had been “found strolling, loitering where alcohol was sold, begging,
or leading a profligate course of life.” Clarification of the statute a decade
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
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later allowed white owners to “retain the service of Indians until 40 years
of age for men and 35 years of age for women.” In May 1862, the Daily
Alta California reported on the common practice of Indian stealing:
Here, it is well known there are a number of men in this county, who have for
years made it their profession to captor [sic] and sell Indians, the price ranging
from $30 to $150, according to quality. . . . It is even asserted that there are men
engaged in it who do not hesitate, when they find a rancheria well stocked with
young Indians, to murder in cold blood all the old ones, in order that they may
safely possess themselves of all the offspring. This affords a key to the history of
border Indian troubles.17
Yet slavery was not optimal for most California growers. Expanding
the fruit and vegetable industries depended on cheap seasonal labor, and
of course it is not profitable to feed or house workers when they are not
needed. Hence, California growers have long preferred laborers who are
not in a position to demand or require housing or other support during
off seasons. When they do need workers, however, growers need a surplus
in order to keep wages down.18 Easily exploited, typically racially distinct
immigrant and migrant labor has filled that niche throughout California’s history and has enabled specialty crop growers to expand their
markets even as land values continued to rise.
Ensuring a sufficient influx of workers to keep wages down while
maintaining enough anti-immigrant pressure to prevent them from
gaining citizenship or rights has been a difficult balance for California
growers, and they have not always succeeded. Aspiring white homesteaders viewed the growers’ large landholdings as a barrier to homesteading.
Understanding that cheap “coolie labor” was essential to maintaining
those holdings, they drove the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882, which the growers quite rationally opposed. This first law restricting immigration to the United States prohibited Chinese already in the
country from becoming citizens and suspended further immigration from
China.19 Ironically, the Exclusion Act also created a brief period of labor
scarcity in which Chinese workers already in the state were able to
demand higher wages.20
After the Exclusion Act passed, the growers still needed labor. Land
reform and sustained upheaval following the restoration of imperial rule
in Japan in 1867–1868 encouraged Japanese farmers to migrate and
become California’s next low-cost labor pool.21 Unlike the Chinese, the
Japanese arrived as families, intending to stay, and until racial prejudice
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Chapter 3
forced otherwise, they did not confine themselves to residential
ghettos. That did not sit well with San Franciscans, who established
“Oriental Schools” for Japanese children when they rebuilt after the
1906 earthquake.22
The Japanese government protested discrimination against its citizens
to little effect, but California agricultural labor issues attracted national
public attention following the 1913 wheatland riot. When twice as many
workers as were needed showed up for jobs picking hops, promised
wages were slashed and living conditions at the site became unbearable.
Workers organizing to confront the situation were attacked by police
and the melee led to four deaths and numerous injuries. Although the
riot was blamed on the Industrial Workers of the World, the subsequent
outcry prompted California to establish the State Commission on Immigration and Housing to set standards for labor camps and sanitation for
fieldworkers. But support for the commission soon withered, and labor
issues once again dropped out of sight. Although the plight of agricultural labor in California has caused episodic national scandals, the issue
has been easily forgotten or deflected in occasional attacks on immigrants reminiscent of the row over the Chinese Exclusion Act. When
McWilliams wrote his classic Factories in the Field in the 1930s, farm
labor issues in California had already “been lost sight of and rediscovered
time and again.”23
Government Subsidies for “Scientific” Farming
Free land and free soil debates about slavery complicated federal land
disposition programs until after the South seceded and left Congress in
1862.24 With the opposition missing, prodevelopment forces in Congress
previously stymied by sectional rivalries quickly adopted three statutes
that were critical to the evolution of the conventional model of agriculture. First, the Homestead Act promised 160 acres to any current or
prospective citizen, man or woman, who would settle and build a house.
A second bill authorized the formation of the Department of Agriculture,
whose programs would help the new settlers succeed as farmers. The
Morrill Act then granted public domain land to each state to establish
“agricultural and mechanical” or “land grant” colleges. In the early
twentieth century, the Newlands Act of 1903, opened the way for federal
subsidies to irrigation.
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
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Federal support for agriculture was at least nominally intended to
encourage smallholders and family farmers, but the programs were easily
adapted to meet the needs of California’s increasingly powerful large
growers. The Homestead Act aimed to support family farming, but the
democratic intent generally failed: in California and elsewhere virtually
all government land distribution programs were manipulated to facilitate
enormous corporate and private holdings.25 Similarly, the government
intended that the land grant colleges and the Department of Agriculture
would support smallholders and rural communities. But both acts put
the nation on a path to “scientific farming,” which was easily turned to
the advantage of the largest producers.
George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature (1864) described Americans’
love affair with science, but that passion began earlier among agriculturalists, inspired by Justus von Liebig’s discoveries about plant nutrition
in the 1840s. The German chemist identified nitrogen, potassium, and
phosphorus (the NPK in fertilizers) as essential to plant growth. Over
the next century, his discoveries underwrote both input-intensive agriculture and a global fertilizer industry. A growing army of land grant college
graduates and researchers encouraged not only fertilizer use but also crop
specialization and mechanization.26 The experience and expertise of previous millennia, particularly regarding soil management, was derided as
outdated, irrational, or superstitious tradition.27
California agribusiness prospered in close relationship to the land
grant college system, particularly after Congress added cooperative
extension, a state-supported network of specialists who “extended” university research to increase productivity on the nation’s farms.28 Inevitably perhaps, benefits from the enormous federal and state agricultural
research and education investments have concentrated on well-organized
and powerful agricultural interests, which were best positioned to provide important political support in return for technical and intellectual
subsidies.29
Similar to the enthusiasm for scientific farming, a commitment to
efficiency underwrote efforts to engineer natural resources to suit California agriculture, especially water. The 1903 Newlands Act established
the Bureau of Reclamation to relocate, store, and distribute water in the
arid lands of the West. As with the Homestead Act, Newlands Act drafters attempted to limit the acreage that could be irrigated with federally
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Chapter 3
“developed” water to family farms no larger than 160 acres. While the
water resources did not have a large impact in California until the midtwentieth century, federal agents had already learned to deflect program
benefits to large growers, the bureau’s most powerful constituency. Congress finally excised the ineffectual 160-acre limitation from federal
statutes in 1982.30
Specialty Crop Science and Shifting Scale
Whereas water looms large in the recent history of California agriculture,
federal investment in plant breeding was initially more important in
shaping patterns of production in the state. During the Victorian era,
programs promoted plant breeding and a vision of a “gigantic horticultural garden.”31 An astounding array of fruit, nut, and vegetable cultivars
rapidly expanded the mission era suite of specialty crops. As transportation improved, particularly after the first cooled-car shipment of California fruit arrived in New York in 1889, orchards of peaches, pears,
and apricots replaced wheat as California’s most important agricultural
products.32 That same year, a Southern Pacific agent predicted that California would become “the orchard for the whole world.”33 By 1900, fruit
was the state’s leading industrial product, and by 1920, California
growers produced nearly half of the fruits and nuts consumed in the
United States.34 Although small producers and truck farmers surrounded
major cities and remained an important feature of California agriculture
at least until the end of World War II,35 most of California’s specialty
crop production has taken place on large holdings.36
The Cooperatives
Growers’ cooperatives solidified growers’ political advantages beginning
in the early twentieth century. American farmers were “virtually unorganized as a professional group” prior to the Civil War. Of course, they did
not need to be: they were the dominant segment of the population and
powerful in every state and region.37 The structure of the national government, a bicameral legislature that apportioned senators by state and
not by population, reflected and protected rural interests. However, as
the federal government expanded in scope and scale, agriculture organized to support public agencies and programs that would support
them.38
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
45
Changing Expectations about Food Quality: Seasonality and Aesthetics
As refrigerated transport carried California fruits, vegetables, and meats
just about anywhere, growers’ marketing cooperatives—not to be confused with Grange-style organizations of buyers—invested in national
advertising and branding of agricultural products that linked California
fruit and vegetables to luxury, beauty, and pleasure.39 Colorful labels
distinguished each grower’s fruit boxes, even as the fruit itself became
an increasingly standardized commodity (figure 3.3).
In the process, the marketing cooperatives redefined the way consumers thought about food: as the refrigerated boxcars improved the appearance and freshness of California products in eastern markets, food quality
came to be measured by the way produce looked after shipping.40 And
because California could provide items that could not be grown in winter
months in the rest of the country, the notion of seasonality in food consumption began to erode.
As they “took charge of the commodity chain,” as Walker styles it,
cooperatives became less benign than their name might suggest.41 Unlike
a buyers’ cooperative, a cooperative marketing organization must control
free riders that might benefit from co-op programs without conforming
to quality control and marketing requirements or paying dues. The state
soon became intertwined with the marketing cooperatives to such a
degree that it blurred distinctions between public and private.42 For
example, in 1917 the state legislature discovered “vital public interests”
in marketing the co-ops’ products and enacted the growers’ own quality
requirements into state law. A state-level Enforcement Branch of the U.S.
Department of Agriculture soon began backing up the cooperatives’
rules, reinforcing their influence.43 Local farmers no longer served local
markets, and co-op rules about shipping and packaging ultimately led to
legislation that made direct sales from farmers to consumers illegal.44
The marketing cooperatives also needed political help because they
were constrained by the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which forbid
collusion among producers “in restraint of trade.” But the peculiar form
of cooperative adopted by the growers was specifically designed to
restrain trade. Sun-Maid soon ran afoul of federal antitrust law. Federal
response established an important new pattern for conventional agribusiness: first the Supreme Court and then Congress, in the 1922 CapperVolsted Act, exempted agricultural co-ops from antitrust rules.45 Co-ops
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Chapter 3
Early Cooperatives: The Rochdale Society and the Grange
Most historians trace cooperatives to a British organization, the Rochdale
Society of Equitable Pioneers. The group was founded in 1844 as a buying
club intended to lower food prices for members by purchasing in bulk. As
the society developed, it promulgated principles for forming a co-op, and
the idea spread rapidly.a
The cooperative became important in U.S. agriculture when the Grange,
formally known as the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry, was established in 1867. The organizers sent representatives to
England very early in its history to study the Rochdale principles.b The
Grange was designed to organize farm families to work together toward
economic well-being and political power (figure 3.2). Its motto delineates
its approach: “In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things,
charity.” By the turn of the twentieth century, the Grange had over 1
million members in rural communities across the country. It was a major
social and political force in agriculture during the post-1870s build-out of
California horticulture, supporting isolated farm families with social
events and buying clubs.
During the development of national mail order firms, the Grange made
a mutually beneficial buying agreement with the newly established Montgomery Ward: the retailer gave Grange members discounts in return for
special access to its members.c Although the Grange has lost traction as a
political representative for farmers, the cooperative form remains important in the Bay Area food story and some food justice activists have
returned to those roots in the past several years, as we shall discuss in
chapter 8.
a. Thompson (1994) and Curl (2009).
b. The Grange gained traction during the financial reversals of the 1870s
and began lobbying for regulation of railroad and grain storage prices. It
also pressed successfully for the 1887 Hatch Act and later for rural mail
delivery and, still later, rural electrification. The poster is available through
the Library of Congress Web site: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/
ppmsca.02956/ (accessed February 2012).
c. Frederick (1997).
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
Figure 3.2
“Gift for the Grangers,” Cincinnati: J. Hale Powers & Co., [1873].
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Chapter 3
Figure 3.3
As commodities became standardized, growers created distinctive labels that
have become a minor art form. Joe Green Estate was located in Cortland, where
available packers, wives of German farmers, were white. But the effort to promote
the product with reference to that fact reflects the racism that has always characterized California’s approach to farm labor. Source: From the collection of
James A. Dahlberg.
not only adopted political and legal tactics to promote their interests and
enforce their rules. They also used violence; the Sun-Maid raisin cooperative, for example, was notorious for its violent efforts to control free
riders.46
Antitrust exemptions for marketing cooperatives may mark the zenith
of growers’ power in the conventional system. Key elements of the
mission era pattern—large landholdings on which exploited, brownskinned laborers produced an astounding array of introduced specialty
crops—had been institutionalized and capitalized. They had also been
backed up by federal support for scientific research and enforced by both
federal and state rules regarding cooperatives’ packing, shipping, and
marketing practices. However, those victories contributed to a crisis of
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
49
overproduction that devastated farm prices and incomes in the 1920s,
and the growers’ power within the system declined thereafter.
Depression Era: A California Model for a National Food System
The crises of the Great Depression brought enormous change to the U.S.
economy,47 but the farm sector had been collapsing for a decade before
the 1929 stock market crash on Black Friday. Mechanization had put
farmers into debt, and resulting overproduction had caused commodity
prices and farm income to fall dramatically. Droughts throughout the
nation in the early 1930s exacerbated the crisis. The number of farms
and farmers had been falling slightly since the 1790s as the nation urbanized; but after a brief uptick following World War I, small farmers were
shaken out in droves. (See figure 3.4.)
To stabilize farm prices and incomes, President Herbert Hoover urged
passage of the 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act. Rapidly expanding
federal participation in the agricultural market added force to a wave of
consolidation that shifted the entire nation toward a model of capitalintensive agriculture, based on patterns that had long defined California
agriculture. Although Depression-era narratives appropriately emphasized government action, it was government inaction regarding labor that
spread that particularly odious part of the model. In addition, the rise
and consolidation of a national food distribution sector played a major,
arguably decisive, role in the consolidation of a national food system.
Some have suggested that because of California’s focus on specialty
crops rather than the commodity grains that were the focus of New Deal
policy, the state was relatively unaffected by those federal programs.48
But that is not entirely accurate. We focus on three durable consequences.
First, programs to help the hungry were intertwined with and subservient
to price supports for agribusiness. Thus, California’s poor participate in
basically the same food aid and school food programs that distribute
surplus foods to the needy elsewhere in the nation. Second, dust bowl
migrants flooding the state eroded the position of Mexican laborers and
focused grower attention on the threat of unions and Communists.
Finally, major changes in retail and distribution turned in part on the car
culture and physical infrastructure that developed first in California. A
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Chapter 3
Farms and Average Acres per Farm in the United States and California,
1900–2007
7
6
Acres per U.S. Farm
(hundred acres)
5
4
Acres per Ca. Farm
(hundred acres)
3
2
U.S. Farms (millions)
1
Ca. Farms (100,000)
2007
2002
1997
1992
1987
1982
1978
1974
1969
1964
1959
1950
1945
1940
1935
1930
1925
1920
1910
1900
0
Figure 3.4
Farms and average acres per farm in the United States and California, 1900–
2007. The data confirm a dramatic decline in the number of farms in the United
States since the mid-1930s—the California model of large landholdings going
national—and a corresponding increase in the size of the average U.S. farm at
the same time. In California, the swings are less dramatic but a slight uptick
in the number of farms since the 1970s and a corresponding but larger decline
in the size of farms may signal the impact of the Williamson Act and the backto-the-landers. Adapted from Hoppe and Banker, 2005, 6; U.S. Census of Agriculture, various years. Note: Western states include Montana, Idaho, Wyoming,
Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, and California; later, Alaska and Hawaii were added. U.S. Agricultural Census data disagree on the average farm size of western states after 1900. For this figure, 1954
census data are used from 1900 to 1954, and 1969 census data are used from
1959 to 1974. Figures from the 2002 Census are not comparable to data from
previous years. See Sumner et al. (2004).
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
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growing consumer movement blew hot and cold about the increasingly
dominant retail operations that grew from the margins of agribusiness
to take control of the food system.
In spite of the enormous diversity and complexity of the government’s
market interventions, the basic logic was simple:
When farmers began to produce too much and prices began to fall, the government would pay farmers to leave some land fallow. When prices threatened to
go too high, the payments would end [in theory anyway] and the land would go
back into cultivation. . . . The government would also buy excess grain from
farmers and store it. In lean years—say, when drought struck—the government
would release some of that stored grain, mitigating sudden price hikes.49
Food Aid in the Depression
Most of what Americans today encounter as school lunch, food stamps,
and federal food and nutrition programs was developed during the financial crises of the 1930s.50 Those roots have caused continuing problems
and controversy in part because the Depression-era programs were specifically not designed or intended to support the needy, but to support agribusiness by distributing surplus commodities that were lowering prices.
The poor were allowed to take up the surplus, but no more.51 The programs reflect Americans’ philosophical ambivalence regarding the poor.
Helping the poor has long been regarded as a religious duty.52 That
changed slightly in England following Henry VIII’s first divorce and the
dismantling of Catholicism. The Elizabethan Poor Laws reallocated the
responsibility to local governments. Although who was obligated to do
what for whom has shifted over the centuries, the obligations have been
fairly consistently structured to be both minimal and socially stigmatizing, and often they benefit those providing the aid. In Elizabethan
England, the law distinguished between “sturdy beggars” and “worthy”
poor,” with the goal of punishing the former while helping the latter,
at least a little. Over centuries of war, migration, urbanization, and the
rise of industrial capitalism, the need for such aid intensified and altered
the details of government programs. But the basic goal of providing
minimal support for the worthy poor survived. Utilitarian philosopher
Jeremy Bentham summarized justifications for limiting assistance to the
barest survival: to discourage laziness and dependence; relief, he said,
should be “an object of wholesome horror.”53 British colonists brought
those ideas to the United States. Although some jurisdictions provided
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Chapter 3
relatively better care for insane, blind, and deaf people and for children,
the fundamental policy goal—preventing destabilizing and unsightly
starvation without creating dependence or rewarding the unworthy
poor—remained.54 Where government efforts proved inadequate, families and churches took up some of the shortfall.
When policymakers realized during the Depression that the hungry
could absorb agricultural overproduction, the caveat remained: they
could take up the excess but no more.55 The 1933 Commodity Credit
Corporation Charter Act authorized the secretary of agriculture to purchase “price-depressing surpluses” and distribute the acquired commodities to the needy. The distribution was explicitly not allowed to compete
with “normal market transactions,” and it was to be discontinued if it
appeared to conflict with the legislation’s primary goal of supporting
agriculture.56 The Food Stamp Program, initiated in 1939, was similarly
constrained. Only after people on relief had spent “an amount of money
representing estimated normal food expenditures” could they use stamps
to buy food “determined by the Department to be surplus.” The program
was not at all designed to ensure that Depression victims gained access
to an appropriate mix and amount of food.57 The relationship between
food aid and surplus distribution continues to confound school lunch
programs and most related food programs.
Agricultural Labor during the Depression: Government Inaction
But what the government did not do at all has continued as an even more
obvious injustice. The dust bowl that decimated the Midwest briefly
changed the complexion of California field labor: displaced “Okies” and
“Arkies” arrived, providing a new source of cheap labor and tremendous
political risk for the growers. With white laborers and families in California’s fields and Congress legislating basic rights for workers throughout the industrial economy, the time should have been right to confront
the exploitative labor practices at the heart of the state’s agriculture.58
With growing militancy nationwide, labor leaders recognized the
opportunity to organize the state’s agricultural sector. Strikes and walkouts by agricultural workers, many of them spontaneous, gained momentum as conditions and wages deteriorated. Organizers came from across
the political spectrum, including Communist “agitators” who organized
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
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the militant Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union (CAWIU).
In 1933, wages in California fields reached a nadir, and the general
atmosphere of union militancy took hold. CAWIU launched a statewide
organizing drive that resulted in twenty-four separate strikes and contributed to at least thirteen more throughout the state.
While some of these actions achieved slight wage increases or other
concessions, growers’ responses were generally brutal: dissenting farmworkers were harassed, beaten, and jailed. The most famous confrontation occurred in Salinas in 1933, when white packing workers temporarily
defied growers’ traditional, race-based divide-and-conquer strategy.
Allying with Filipino field laborers, they demanded union recognition
and better conditions. Growers negotiated with the white workers but
refused to talk to the Filipinos. Instead, with help from local police, they
burned their camps, beat their leaders, and imported scabs. When white
workers abandoned their temporary solidarity and looked the other way,
they were rewarded with a two-year union contract. Once the growers
regained the upper hand, they refused to renew the contract; instead they
dismissed protesting workers and brought in more docile replacements.
The conflict inspired a new organization, the Associated Farmers of
California, to fight unionization and Communist agitation.59
In the years that followed, more moderate reformers insisted that if
employers offered year-round jobs with decent wages, more white Californians would happily seek employment in the fields. That hypothesis
has never been tested.60 Although Congress was willing to intervene in
many aspects of the agricultural economy, it could not reach consensus
about labor. The 1930s was a particularly virulent period in U.S. labor
history, and California growers echoed leaders in other industries, depicting desperate, largely nonideological workers as a Communist threat.
Congress divided, with House members tending to emphasize the Communist elements and favoring restricting workers’ rights, while most
senators favored including agricultural laborers in the growing suite of
rights then being granted to all nonagricultural workers.
Through the Grange, the Farm Bureau, and other organizations, California growers lobbied to exempt agricultural labor from worker protection laws, social security, and similar programs then being legislated.
Their argument turned on what is called agricultural exceptionalism:
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Chapter 3
because of seasonal and weather fluctuations, farmers cannot easily
speed up or slow production in response to market factors. Therefore,
the growers argued, they required exceptional treatment from governments, including price supports, low interest loans, and exemption from
certain taxes and regulations. One of their foremost concerns was labor
regulations and immigration law, and they, in alliance with agricultural
interests nationwide, demanded special exemptions and policies for
agriculture. The growers won many of these concessions, and many
of the new protections and rights granted to American workers during
the 1930s and 1940s were explicitly denied to those working in the
fields.61
The Bracero Program
As World War II created labor shortages, California growers were again
left with the problem of locating low-wage and easily manipulated seasonal workers. A slight alteration in immigration policy provided the
answer. The Roosevelt administration worked with the Mexican government to design the bracero program (from the Spanish brazo, or arm),
to admit what are now referred to as guest workers. Although Mexican
officials tried, as had the Japanese before them, to establish standards to
protect the migrants, they fared no better. The program also authorized
the U.S. Department of Labor to return the guest workers to their home
country after a specified period.62
In 1954 the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service launched
Operation Wetback to return workers without proper documentation
(along with numerous U.S.-born Mexican Americans) to Mexico, many
of whom returned again and again to labor in California fields. Singer
and songwriter Woody Guthrie lamented the nameless victims of a plane
crash carrying unneeded workers home. Folk singer and House UnAmerican Activities Committee target Pete Seeger popularized Guthrie’s
work, which became a staple in the rising folk and protest repertoire:63
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except “deportees”?64
We will encounter alternative approaches to agricultural labor markets
in chapters 7 and 8, but the basic pattern remains. California growers
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
55
have long invested energy and resources not in employees but in politicians who will ensure that national immigration policy meets their exacting requirements. Martin summarizes the strategy with a neat analogy
between labor policy and agricultural water management:
If water is cheap, farmers flood fields with water; if water is expensive, farmers
may invest in drip irrigation systems. The analogy to recruitment and retention
[of labor] is clear: farmers more often work collectively to flood the labor market
with workers, usually by getting border gates opened or left ajar, instead of
recruiting and retaining the best farm workers for their operation.65
Chain Stores, Grocery Stores, and Self-Service Supermarkets
In spite of the growers’ significant and durable Depression-era victory,
they were losing traction as a power center in the conventional food
system. A revolution in food distribution—transportation, processing,
and retailing—that continues today began to develop after the Civil War.
Specialty shops and mobile retail—butchers, greengrocers, bakeries, peddlers, and milkmen—were the heart of most U.S. food distribution
through the mid-twentieth century (figure 3.5 a, b, c, and d). That
changed rapidly after World War II. Railroads and cooperatives catalyzed
the initial shift, and the marketing cooperatives soon joined sanitation
and public health advocates to create a cleaner, more controlled food
distribution system.
San Francisco’s arrangement was typical, if accelerated by natural
disaster. After the 1906 earthquake, food distribution was limited to the
city’s wholesale produce market, where it could be effectively inspected
and regulated.66 By the end of World War I, fewer than one hundred
wholesalers controlled the supply of agricultural products to stores and
restaurants throughout the city. Indeed, the San Francisco district handled
the fresh food supply from Santa Clara to Sonoma. Wholesalers distributed California’s standardized commodities among small specialty retailers—greengrocers, bakers, and butchers.67 The chain store groceries that
rose to prominence in the 1920s, including the Great American Tea
Company, began a revolution that changed all that.
Large and rapidly consolidating grocery store chains took advantage
of agricultural overproduction to squeeze producers on price. The
introduction of self-service around World War I intensified the shift:
mass selling of standardized, prepackaged commodities in retail outlets
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a
b
Figure 3.5
Specialists including peddlers, greengrocers, and butchers were central to food
distribution through the mid-twentieth century. (a) Chinese vegetable peddler in
Oakland, c. 1890. Source: Moses Chase Album, Joseph R. Knowland Collection,
Oakland Public Library; (b) San Francisco green grocer during World War II
(photograph by Dorothea Lange, War Years North Beach (Italian Sector)) Source:
The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of
Oakland, gift of Paul S. Taylor; (c) Richmond, California butcher shop, 1914.
Source: Richmond Local History Photograph Collection, Richmond Public
Library; (d) Farmer selling melons and peaches at a farmers’ market in Albany,
California, in 1945. Source: Courtesy of the Albany Library Historical
Collection.
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c
d
Figure 3.5
(continued)
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Chapter 3
From the Great American Tea Company to the A&P
The Great American Tea Company began in New York City just before
the Civil War as a purveyor of fine teas in the butcher and baker specialty
shop tradition of food distribution. But as the United States developed
a national economy, its founder began buying teas directly from China,
eliminating diverse middlemen, and organized merchants across the nation
into “clubs” to sell the high-quality product at a low price.d When the
transcontinental railroad opened, the clubs became a string of “grocery
stores,” and the renamed Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company became
an early grocery store, selling diverse condiments and household items
as well.e
Additional outlets made the A&P a chain store that benefited from
economies of scale and central management. Significantly, it also offered
a limited selection of predictable, uniform products and set prices. Chain
stores were also a new sort of buyer, well suited to the large-scale, marketing co-op-based marketing that was emerging in California. The A&P
eliminated standard service features of retail selling—credit sales, home
deliveries, purchase stamps, and premiums—and offered instead a reliable,
pleasant, and anonymous experience for shoppers. Its “cash-and-carry”
service was efficient, cheap, and immensely popular.f At its peak in 1930,
A&P operated at 15,137 sites. At midcentury, it began to lose market share
to discount superstores and was purchased by a German retailer in 1979.
The company filed for bankruptcy in 2010.
d. W. Walsh (1986).
e. In a parallel universe, similar changes were coming to the meat industry:
Gustavus Swift used the railroads to revolutionize meat distribution,
bypassing the local butchers who had long dominated the market.
f. W. Walsh (1986).
was designed for high volume and minimal staffing. In 1920, chain
stores accounted for about 4 percent of retail food sales in the United
States. By 1935, the four top chain operations did 25 percent of all
American retail, and consolidation had just begun.68 Food distribution
and retail operations, increasingly national in scope, soon entered the
processing and distribution businesses and began offering their own
brands of basic commodities, a virtual death knell for milkmen and
vegetable peddlers who sold local products along an established route.
Butchers were similarly displaced as chain buyers demanded not sides
of beef or pork, but rather precut and wrapped portions of meat.69
(See figure 3.5.)
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
59
Supermarkets, Parking Lots, and a New Breed of Consumers
The model that A&P started led to one adopted throughout the country
by imitators, including Kroger and Piggly Wiggly. But the center of innovation in food retail soon shifted to California, where automobiles, lowdensity development, and a rapidly expanding highway system were
beginning to reshape the scale, form, and location of food distribution.
The immense modern supermarket, occupying huge warehouses surrounded by even bigger parking lots, could attract shoppers from miles
around with an immense array of low-cost products. This model was
especially suited to the automobile-oriented culture and environment of
midcentury California.70
Vons of Los Angeles and Safeway of Oakland provide a window into
this expanding and ultimately revolutionary breed of retail (see figure
3.6 a and b). Like A&P, Vons started small, with a single warehouse-style
operation, where the emphasis was on volume and efficiency, rather than
service or décor, in Los Angeles. As it began adding new locations, Vons
leased space at the front of each store to independent specialty vendors.
But they did not last long as part of the model. And as the industry
continued to consolidate, the Oakland-based Safeway chain acquired
Vons. Safeway had also started small, when Sam Seelig opened one location in Los Angeles in 1915. As he began adding new sites, Seelig soon
lost control of the business and merged with the Skaggs chain of Idaho.
A confusing series of acquisitions and mergers designed in the mid-1920s
by Merrill Lynch founder Charles Merrill combined numerous chains in
the western states under the Safeway name with Skaggs at the helm. Two
decades after its founding, Safeway was the second largest chain in the
nation, having transformed its acquisitions from grocery stores into a
new breed of retail: supermarkets.71
The modern self-service supermarket took economies of scale to a new
level, emphasizing high volume and low price during the Depression. But
by the 1950s, the convenience it offered was equally compelling. Supermarkets were a major driver in the rise of food processing, promoting
fast and easily prepared foods for busy shoppers. Supermarkets were also
instrumental in promoting frozen foods in the 1950s, which were cheap,
durable, and completely impervious to seasonality.72 Spacious and well
lit, supermarkets often featured tall, eye-catching displays of (sanitary)
canned goods emphasizing the mantra, “Pile it high, sell it low.”73
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Figure 3.6
California-based Safeway spearheaded the shift to the automobile-oriented
supermarket as the basis of food distribution after World War II. (top) A San
Francisco storefront c. 1936. (bottom) A supermarket in the Marina district,
1959. Source: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
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Supermarket chains grew dramatically and gained enormous power
in the decades following World War II. By the 1970s, a handful of major
regional supermarket chains dominated as both purchasers of food
and food retailers.74 Equally profound, the self-service operations encouraged Americans to regard themselves as consumers. Packaging, branding, and marketing became important components of food choice, and
the freedom to consume entered as a critical subtext of a transformed
marketplace.75
Car Culture and Processed Foods
New Deal efforts to employ the jobless in road-building projects subsidized expansion of motor, as opposed to railroad, transport. The intersection of supermarket and highway was supported by yet another regulatory
exemption for agriculture. Farmers had been among the first and most
enthusiastic mechanizers. They began to load their own vehicles to transport their own products in the 1920s, and farmers lobbied to protect
their own participation in food transport as New Deal legislators considered regulation of the expanding trucking industry.
The 1935 Motor Carrier Act went well beyond that, granting
agriculture broad exemptions from trucking regulation and labor law
for products in transit.76 The act helped lift the Teamsters Union into
power, but trucking of agricultural products proceeded outside New
Deal rules that stabilized wages and costs.77 Independent food system
truckers were not helped by their political success. In spite of a mystique of freedom and free enterprise, their reality was quite grim.
Owner-operator truckers took on enormous risk and committed themselves to pursuing unpredictable, low-wage work. The conditions were
reinforced by an antiunion ethos embedded in growing consumer
advocacy.
Postwar Agricultural Intensification
In the generally prosperous decades following World War II, consolidation, intensification, and integration of the food system proceeded as
if on, and then actually on, steroids. Small farms continued to disappear as government programs penalized family operators who did not
“get big or get out.” Small producers turned to contract farming, and
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62
Chapter 3
popular demand for processed foods and fast foods turned meat and
potatoes into the burger and fries, and then this “all American meal,”
into a health hazard. Food quality plummeted as producers adopted
high-tech farming practices designed to produce larger quantities of
commodities, and processors and fast food came to the center of the
American diet.
Food and Cars
Yet another burst of road building during the Eisenhower administration
intensified Americans’ preoccupation with automobiles. Because transportation is the second-largest expense in agricultural production, maintaining low-cost transportation became a core priority in the postwar
industrial food system. Agribusiness and rural interests allied with big
trucking firms to promote the Highway Trust Fund. Established in 1956,
it allocated gas tax receipts to subsidize the National Defense Highway
System, a comprehensive interstate highway system.78 Mobility along
highways also allowed firms to relocate operations such as meatpacking
and processing away from centers of union power toward less unionfriendly operations in the South and West.79
The roads also encouraged food retailers to create destinations for
motorists and contributed to a new, and ultimately destructive, diet: fast
food. Especially popular in California, the auto-oriented food culture
underwrote the emergence of the drive-in.80 Stands selling prepared food
had long been ubiquitous but seasonal. Nonetheless, in southern California, where “it felt like summer all year long . . . a whole new industry
was born.” The idea “combined girls, cars, and late-night food.” But
Anaheim burger vendors Richard and Maurice McDonald went a step
further. They adapted the basic theme of supermarket success to create
fast food. They replaced curb service with their Speedee Service System
that promised potential franchise owners: “No Carhops—No Waitresses—No Dishwashers—No Bus Boys—The McDonald’s System is
Self-Service.”81 When Ray Kroc bought out the McDonald brothers, the
modern fast food approach to integrated food production, sourcing,
processing, and distribution was born.82 Currently more than half the
ground beef consumed in the United States is eaten away from home,
mostly in restaurants, and the nation’s puny vegetable consumption
consists primarily of chips, fries, and catsup.83
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
63
The Population Bomb and the Green Revolution
Amazingly, Depression-era crop subsidies designed to respond to massive
overproduction were soon defended and justified by scarcities. First
wartime shortages and then postwar Malthusian horror stories drove
continuation of the subsidies. After Pearl Harbor, rationing focused
attention on limits: FDR revived World War I price controls and curtailed
the sale of meat, butter, and other consumer goods. Victory gardens
sprouted across the nation. The scarcities did not last, but their shadow
hung over agricultural policy throughout the developed world, driving
further intensification and ever more destructive overproduction even
while the subsidies continued.
The skewed incentives did not go wholly unnoticed: President Truman’s secretary of agriculture Charles F. Brannan proposed a plan that
would have ended price supports and allowed the market to set prices
for perishable agricultural commodities. Brannan also proposed focusing
on the disappearance of small farmers by limiting government aid to
producers at or near the average U.S. family farm size.84 The plan was
extensively debated in Congress but soundly defeated. Farm policy rhetoric continued to exploit Americans’ longstanding love affair with small
family farms, even as government programs ultimately benefited increasingly larger and more integrated food conglomerates.85
Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 blockbuster, The Population Bomb, predicted
overpopulation leading to global disaster and provided intellectual and
political cover for further intensification and subsidies. The scarcity
analysis has been familiar ever since Thomas Malthus argued that
unchecked population would rapidly outpace food supplies and lead
to mass suffering and starvation. Ehrlich’s analysis added the fledgling
environmental movement’s concerns to the familiar Malthusian mix,
emphasizing the fragile earth, and an era of limits, resource degradation,
and disease that not even the wealthy could escape. Ehrlich’s polemic
was broadly discussed and deeply polarizing, attracting criticism for
its racist overtones and for stirring up anti-immigration sentiment.86
However, the dispute provided cover for an avalanche of technological
innovation in the food system that soon drowned out basic facts about
overproduction.
Without regard for the fact that the farm crises of the previous several
decades had been caused by overproduction, the green revolution resulted
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Chapter 3
Cattle Production after World War II
California’s bonanza beef industry was displaced by specialty crops in the
nineteenth century, but cattle returned to the region after World War II in
massive feeding facilities. One of the nation’s first confined animal feeding
operations (CAFO) was designed by a former Safeway supermarket executive who sensed opportunity in the demand for backyard steaks and the
fast food hamburgers. Located in Bakersfield, California, the operation
fed up to 50,000 animals at a time using rigidly controlled grain-based
“rations.” Beef marbled with streaks of fat soon defined quality for suburbanizing Americans enjoying cookouts. Grain surpluses resulting from
a combination of favorable growing conditions, high-yielding new hybrid
varieties, and federal subsidies underwrote the shift to CAFOs along with
an influx of investment encouraged by federal tax incentives. Tax breaks
encouraged thousands of wealthy Americans, including cowboy-actor John
Wayne, to join clubs (actually limited partnerships) “that bought livestock,
placed them in feedlots, and then sold them for club members.”g
The CAFOs led to changes in meat processing. Both Armor and Swift
abandoned their Chicago stockyards in the 1950s and relocated in rural,
usually union-free areas, where they could get tax breaks to build a new
generation of packing plants. As transportation fully shifted from rail to
truck, huge slaughter plants were built near the new feedlots throughout
rural America. By the early 1960s, roughly 40 percent of the cattle slaughtered in the United States were finished in highly automated, western “beef
factories.”h Consolidation continued, and by the twentieth-century’s end,
four companies controlled more than 80 percent of meat processing.
g. Hamilton (2008).
h. See Greenberg (1970) and Skaggs (1986). Hoy (1978) describes farming
to create tax losses as a perennial problem.
from several decades of government and private research into increasing
crop yields. Scientists developed strains of rice that were particularly
responsive to fertilizers.87 Simultaneously chemical firms discovered ways
to produce large amounts of inexpensive fertilizer from fossil fuels. Soon
they also figured out that steroids would speed animal growth. And they
used antibiotics prophylactically to control the diseases that arose in the
crowded concentrated animal feeding operations that were developed for
dairy and beef cattle in California and spread rapidly across the nation.
Although the environmental and public health consequences of these
shifts raised early alarms, the dominant response was initially as euphoric
as Americans’ embrace of scientific farming a century earlier. The input
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
65
and capital-intensive approach to agriculture was exported along with
still troubling U.S. surpluses to the Third World, where the alleged population bomb was looming.88
Input Suppliers
The growing reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides added yet
another set of politically powerful and increasingly concentrated corporate players to the food system roster: the companies that produced the
inputs. Their continuing importance was baked into the technology: as
target pests became resistant to one set of chemicals, industry developed
another set to maintain yields.89 Similarly, as pesticides and fertilizers
displaced natural soil fertility and killed beneficial insects, soil bacteria,
and, increasingly, pollinators, new and improved technological fixes were
required.
In the post–World War II United States, important scientific discoveries in low-tech and low-cost biological pest control were overtaken and
eventually largely displaced by increasing reliance on chemical pesticides.
Technological advances displaced a century and a half of cumulative
farmer efforts to adapt Old World crops and practices to a new continent.
Farmers’ skill sets shifted from understanding natural processes to managing chemical inputs.90
Get Big or Get Out: Cheap Food and Food Dumping
In the 1970s, the long-standing federal commitment to overproduction
intensified, specifically embracing not small family farmers but increasing scale and intensity, which were glossed as on-farm efficiency.91 The
priorities of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz (1971–1976) were shaped
by major shifts in the global economy. In 1975, the United States experienced a positive trade balance for the last time. At a point when fundamental, continuing problems of import and export ratios became a
major problem for the nation, agriculture attracted attention because it
was the only sector in which the United States generated an actual trade
surplus. But to remain a dominant player in the world market, Butz
insisted that the United States would have to accelerate the trend toward
a smaller number of large, least-cost operators.92 Bad weather in 1972
produced poor harvests all over the world, and Butz seemed briefly like
a genius. Policymakers urged farmers to “plant from fencerow to
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66
Chapter 3
fencerow.”93 Farmers responded enthusiastically, going deep into debt in
order to “get big.”
The Butz era precipitated enormous environmental destruction that
required exempting agribusiness from yet another round of fundamental
regulatory reform in the United States: the national movement to limit
and internalize the environmental costs of production. During the “environmental decade,” Congress made “a nearly unbroken series of decisions
to exclude farms and farming from the burdens of federal environmental
law,” creating “a vast ‘anti-law’ of farms and the environment.” Many
states followed suit.94 For example, although the Clean Water Act (CWA)
“prohibits the ‘discharge of any pollutant by any person,’ . . . this prohibition is riddled with important exemptions for farms.” The CWA’s definition of pollutant includes “agricultural waste discharged into water,” but
outside the definitions section, the statute puts agricultural discharges
“largely beyond regulatory reach.”95 Regulating the pollution generated
by CAFOs has, for example, proven near impossible.96 Because CAFOs
are defined legally as farms, not factories, they are exempt from many
relevant air and water pollution regulations and actually qualify for
government subsidies to deal with agricultural waste.97
The economic conditions of the 1970s were particularly difficult for
small farmers, many of whom turned to contracting as a strategy for bare
survival. They agreed to supply specific manufacturers or retailers, particularly fast food restaurants and still-consolidating grocery stores, with
product grown to strict specifications in exchange for a guaranteed price.
Most of the risks remained with the farmers, who invested heavily in
intensification required by the processors and retailers who increasingly
controlled on-farm practices. Integrated buyers would provide the seed,
chicks or piglets, strict protocols for managing their growth, and specifications for the finished product. As integrated global corporations offered
lower and lower prices to the heavily leveraged suppliers, justice for
farmers became a heightened concern for many family farm advocates.98
Conclusion
Walker urges us to admire the genius of California and, by extension,
American agribusiness, before we evaluate or criticize it.99 The system is
a product of two and a half centuries of enterprise, insight, organizing
and political action, consumption, and very hard work. California
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California Agriculture and Conventional Food
67
growers seized the opportunities in railroad construction to create products and marketing mechanisms that allowed them to dominate global
food production. They redefined how we grow food, sell food, and
indeed what we consider to be food. The growers were soon overpowered, however, by a sequence of equally innovative distributors, marketers, processors, contractors, and input providers who have dominated
and redefined the conventional food system.
While admiring the genius, we also note that the same choices have
given us increasingly unsafe food, underpaid and undignified jobs for
disenfranchised and easily exploited migrants, and environmental devastation. For most of the twentieth century, the image of the independent
homesteader and family farmer sustained and concealed political and
economic power sufficient to avoid basic regulatory constraints on the
exploitation of labor, externalize enormous environmental and public
health consequences, devour oil in diverse forms, and create many rather
tasteless, nutritionally deficient, foodlike substances.
Clearly there is nothing inevitable about the conventional agricultural
system. It is the product of conscious choices, sustained effort, risk
taking, and public and private investment. The basic model for this
system began to take shape as the earliest Europeans settled in California.
It was underwritten by the enormous resources circulating in the state
after the Gold Rush and during the capitalist penetration of the U.S.
West. When overproduction encouraged by that trajectory brought the
system to its knees, the federal government intervened in the market to
support prices, effectively enabling another round of consolidation and
intensification that made the overproduction problem worse still. The
system was further encouraged by the war economy and then by the
adaptation of chemical weapons to the production of food.
Although it threatens human and environmental health, most clearly
where the two intersect, the conventional food system is not about to
collapse under its own weight. It would make things easier for reformers
if we could believe that people just began to notice and protest the public
health, social, and environmental costs of our food system, but that is
not the case. Since late in the nineteenth century, soil scientists, nutritionists, and public health professionals have joined consumers, workers’
advocates, and social reformers in demonstrating the system’s increasingly negative consequences and offering more promising alternatives.
The efforts of those early reformers are treated in the next chapter.
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
BERKELEY • DAVIS •
IRVINE • LOS ANGELES
• MERCED • RIVERSIDE
• SAN DIEGO • SAN
FRANCISCO
SANTA BARBARA • SANTA CRUZ
“Our goal is audacious, and it is far-reaching. It is our intent to do everything in our power to put
the world on a pathway to feed itself in ways that are nutritious and sustainable.”
— UC President Janet Napolitano
Background and Rationale
By virtue of their charge to lead the nation in agricultural innovation, land-grant institutions have a
unique ability and responsibility to tackle the global food challenge. How will we sustainably and
nutritiously feed a world population expected to reach 8 billion by 2025?
The University of California (UC) has committed to helping the world achieve zero hunger by aligning
its resources in a system-wide effort called the UC Global Food Initiative - GFI. It is a bold goal, but
one that is vital to the world’s future. We believe that the model developed at UC may provide an
organizational model for other educational institutions. Learn more about the Global Food Initiative by
viewing this brief video.
Overview
UC President Janet Napolitano launched the University of California Global Food Initiative on July 1,
2014. The initiative emerged from widespread interest in the food system at the ten UC campuses,
UC’s Agriculture and Natural Resource Division and the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. Read the
GFI announcement here.
The GFI is harnessing UC’s resources to address what is perhaps the most critical issue of our time:
How to sustainably and nutritiously feed a world population expected to reach 8 billion by 2025.
The initiative aligns the university’s research, outreach and operational efforts in a sustained and
organized way to develop, demonstrate and export solutions for food security, health and sustainability
throughout California, the United States and the world. Read a one-page overview of the GFI here.
The GFI already involves thousands of faculty, students, staff and alumni. It draws on UC’s leadership
in agriculture, medicine, climate science, public policy, social science, biological science, humanities,
arts and law, among other disciplines.
It builds on work UC already is doing…from breeding new crop varieties (part of its land-grant
mission) and improving nutrition to modeling climate change and sharing knowledge that is increasing
literacy in food, agriculture and science. The GFI is breaking down the silos that often exist between
disciplines and campuses, and is enabling us to focus our collective efforts to do more.
Goals
The GFI has four basic goals in support of the overarching vision of putting us on a pathway to
sustainably and nutritiously feeding a growing population and achieving zero hunger in the world. An
University of California
Global Food Initiative
underlying principle has been to closely and authentically examine the institution’s own practices. The
specific goals of the GFI are to:
•
•
•
•
Work together across the UC system to create solutions that improve food security, health and
sustainability throughout California, the U.S. and the world;
Identify best practices to address food needs and create toolkits to share locally and globally;
Use the latest UC research to help communities access healthy, sustainable food; and
Apply UC expertise to shape and drive food policy discussions.
The GFI works beyond UC by partnering with nonprofits, government agencies and others to translate
UC’s cutting edge research into policies and programs that help communities in California and around
the world eat more sustainably and nutritiously. We have an international fellows program that is
facilitating the exchange of information and technology. The GFI is also driving operational
improvements across the UC system aimed at using UC’s collective buying power and dining practices
to implement best practices for healthy and sustainable campus communities.
Governance
The Global Food Initiative involves all 10 UC campuses, UC’s Division of Agriculture and Natural
Resources (ANR), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the UC Office of the President
(UCOP). The work is guided by a system wide steering committee appointed by UC President Janet
Napolitano, the chancellors and the vice president of ANR. Interdisciplinary working groups and
subcommittees focus on projects; these groups include representatives from the campuses, ANR,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UCOP.
Topics and Working Groups
The GFI currently organizes its work under five key topic areas that cover a broad spectrum of food
system issues. They include:
•
•
•
•
•
Food production;
Access and security;
Sourcing;
Education and communication; and
Policy and public impact.
More than 20 system-wide subcommittees and campus-based task forces are working on numerous
vital projects under these five areas of inquiry: curriculum, operations, policy, research, and service.
Teams consist of students, staff, faculty and partners from outside the University.
Below is a brief description of each area of inquiry, including the research questions, project examples
and some success stories. Links to reports and other resources developed by the project teams are
included.
•
Curriculum
o Research Questions: How do we teach students about food and agricultural systems,
and communicate that information with the public? Global Food Initiative curriculum
University of California
Global Food Initiative
subcommittees are helping prepare the next generation of science communicators,
enhance experiential learning opportunities, increase food literacy, catalog existing
food-related courses and develop new online introduction courses to food-related
issues.1
o Project Examples: CLEAR science communication2; experiential learning3; food
literacy4; online food courses; UC system wide course catalog listing of food-related
courses.
o Success Story: The Experiential Learning Subcommittee developed a report
highlighting the best practices, lessons learned and case studies of experiential learning
opportunities at UC, along with “living” online directories of those courses and
programs.
1
•
Operations
o Research Questions: How do we improve our operations so that we increase access to
nutritious and sustainable food? Global Food Initiative operations subcommittees are
working to ensure food security among UC students, facilitate small growers’ ability to
do business with UC, increase procurement of sustainable food, enhance the availability
of healthy choices in campus vending machines, and reduce waste in both residential
and retail dining.
o Project Examples: Food security and access on UC campuses (student hunger)5;
procurement: improving the ability of small farmers to sell to the UC system; vending
machine policy; and zero waste policies.6
o Success Story: A subcommittee composed of members of the UC Merced and UC Santa
Barbara committees identified the best practices from their campus dining services in
purchasing sustainable local produce from small growers. This information has been
shared throughout the UC system.7
•
Policy
o Research Questions: How do we raise awareness about food issues, help inform food
policy and elevate food policy as a priority? Global Food Initiative policy
The UC GFI has produced a one-page resource and information sheet on school and community outreach.
The CLEAR Project – Communication, Literacy & Education for Agricultural Research - is composed of a group of
young scientists at the University of California, Berkeley who want to find better ways to communicate science at the
forefront of discovery. The project is co-led by ANR specialist (also Berkeley faculty member) Peggy Lemaux and Dawn
Chiniquy, a postdoctoral researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Labs. The goal of CLEAR is to communicate factbased information grounded in scientific evidence to feed the growing world population, address the new demands of the
changing climate, and decrease our environmental footprint.
3
The Experiential Learning Subcommittee published this report – “Learning from the Ground Up: Experiential Learning in
Food and Agriculture Systems at the University of California” – in February 2016. Kate Kaplan, UC Berkeley Food
Institute; GFI Student Fellow Damian Parr, UC Santa Cruz; Jennifer Sowerwine, UC ANR and UC Berkeley; Lori Ann
Thrupp, UC Berkeley Food Institute; and Mark Van Horn, UC Davis Agricultural Sustainability Institute and Student Farm
wrote the report.
4
Read this UC Food Observer blog post for one academic’s observations about the importance of GFI’s food literacy
efforts.
5
The GFI has produced a one-page resource sheet that provides resources and information to help campuses address food
security and nutrition in their campus communities.
6
This one-page resource sheet provides resources and information to make campuses healthier through operations.
7
A report was produced by the Best Practices Subcommittee on Facilitating Small Growers’ Ability to Do Business With
UC.
2
University of California
Global Food Initiative
subcommittees have created a clearinghouse and calendar of food-related activities at
UC, launched two lecture series (on food equity and on healthy
students/campuses/communities), collected policy success stories, and are mobilizing
law schools to address food equity and ethics.8
o Project Examples: Food law policy clinic; food equity lecture series; translating
research into policy.
o Success Story: Helping academics leverage food and agricultural research to inform
public policy: publication, case studies, and workshop.9
8
•
Research
o Research Questions: How do we raise awareness about UC’s food-related research and
explore new frontiers in food and agriculture? Global Food Initiative research
subcommittees are working to survey UC students about food security, catalog UC
research in sustainable agriculture, share success stories in fisheries and international
food issues, explore the impact of climate change on agriculture, and examine urban
agriculture’s potential to reduce food disparities.
o Project Examples: Data mining: Current and future impact of changing climate
conditions on California agriculture productivity and sustainability; food security
(hunger); food from the sea (maritime/fisheries sustainability); urban agriculture and
food disparities, etc.
o Success Story: A team of researchers from UC San Diego, UCLA and UC Berkeley is
examining urban agriculture and food disparities. In the first phase of the project, they
created an initial geo-database using publicly available archives on food and foodrelated health indicators at the census tract and county level. They are currently
developing three case studies on food access and opportunities around urban agriculture
(Richmond Urban Tilth); food education and food security (West Oakland Middle
School Center for Ecoliteracy, Oakland Unified School District); and community-run
greenhouses in Bayview, San Francisco working with Literacy for Environmental
Justice). Additionally, the team is examining the nexus of food, climate and water. They
have led community workshops, focusing on soil ecology and illustrating basic
components of ecosystems, the types and roles of soil fauna, and their functions in
creating healthy food plants and environments.
•
Service
o Research Questions: How do we improve nutrition at K-12 schools, expand farmers
markets and increase student engagement in food issues? Global Food Initiative service
subcommittees are working to help establish farmers markets on campuses, expand
local food production, maximize the use of campus dining meals, develop healthy and
A subcommittee produced a report – “Food Equity, Social Justice, and the Role of Law Schools: A Call to Action.” It
explores the opportunity for law schools within UC and across the country to more visibly and holistically address food
system injustices.
9
The GFI Policy Subcommittee issued a report entitled “Linking Food and Agriculture Research to Policy.” The report was
compiled by Ann Thrupp, PhD (UC Berkeley Food Institute); Nina F. Ichikawa, MA (UC Berkeley Food Institute); Josette
Lewis, PhD (UC Davis World Food Center); Laura Schmidt, PhD, MSW, MPH (UC San Francisco) and GFI student
assistant Pallavi Sherikar. The Policy Subcommittee pivoted off the report and convened a workshop for more than seventy
food, agriculture, and public health researchers and university staff. This workshop showcased successful research-topolicy cases, included keynote speeches from California State Senator Bill Monning and U.S. Congressman Mark
DeSaulnier, and brought in university government relations experts to equip researchers to engage effectively with policy.
University of California
Global Food Initiative
sustainable dining options for K-12 students, and involve students in fellowship
programs.
o Project Examples: Edible campuses; farmers markets; K-12 dining; student fellowships
(UC campus and international fellowships); SWIPES for meals10; etc.
o Success Stories: The Swipes program allows students to donate excess dollars on their
meal plan to fight hunger. It began at UCLA and has expanded nationwide. A UC team
created a guide detailing how to start a campus swipes program.
Reports and toolkits from these areas are available on a Best Practices portal page on the GFI website.
Mentoring, Fellowships and Awards Programs
Students and young people are vital to solving global food challenges. Through a range of awards and
fellowship opportunities (both domestic and international), the UC GFI seeks to mentor and support
the next generation of food and agriculture leaders.
30 Under 30 Awards
The inaugural 30 Under 30 Award winners were announced on June 14, 2016. The awards recognize
individuals – both inside and outside the UC system - under the age of thirty who have made
significant contributions to a wide array of food-related fields, including food production, food access
and security, food sourcing, food education and community, and food policy and public impact. The
30 Under 30 Awards provide a unique and important opportunity to acknowledge student activism and
early career work.
Global Food Initiative Fellows
In 2014, 54 UC students were awarded UC Global Food Initiative fellowships. The $2,500 fellowships
to undergraduate and graduate students have funded projects that address issues ranging from
community gardens and food pantries to urban agriculture and food waste. The students have also had
opportunities to convene. While the bulk of the Fellowships came from the GFI fund, some campuses
augmented and supported additional fellowships through matching and private donations. Learn about
the Fellows here.
UC-USAID Fellows
UC and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have partnered to expand a
fellowship program that addresses pressing agricultural development challenges around the globe.
Graduate student fellows spend two to six months helping partner organizations solve scientific,
technological, organizational and business challenges. USAID’s Global Development Lab launched
this program last year with six universities, including UC Berkeley and UC Davis. The UC Global
Food Initiative is co-sponsoring fellowships to help expand the program at UC Berkeley and to help
UC Davis to extend its program to include fellowships at UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz. Learn
more here.
Communications Strategies
10
This publication – “Swipe Out Hunger: A Guide to Creating Your Campus Sustainable Meal Sharing and Recovery
Program” – was produced by the GFI Swipes for Meals Subcommittee.
University of California
Global Food Initiative
There has been explosive growth in the attention being paid to food and agricultural issues by any
number of audiences, including the general public. Food is a leveler: everyone eats and everyone is a
stakeholder. Food issues transcend borders and bring into play the environment, human health, social
justice, politics, public policy, national security and more. A lesson learned from the GFI has been that
there is a unique opportunity for land-grant institutions to take a lead in communicating about the
important issues surrounding the food system. It is a rich content environment for communicators.
The GFI initiative also provides an opportunity to communicate science information to a range of
audiences. With research indicating a widening gap between what scientists know about critical foodrelated issues and what the public believes, there has never been a more important time to increase
science literacy.
The GFI team has developed a range of communications tools and strategies to capitalize on this
interest and to provide a public service through education.
GFI Landing Page and Portal
A GFI landing page and portal facilitates communications around the initiative, for both internal and
external audiences. The landing page enables site visitors to quickly delve into the GFI’s work through
links to news stories, research, programs, people, multimedia pieces and more. There is also an events
calendar that communicates the vast array of opportunities for the public to engage with UC on the
initiative. The landing page connects to each UC campus, UC ANR, Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory and UCOP.
The UC Food Observer
As part of the GFI, UC launched the UC Food Observer (UCFO) in January 2015. UCFO is a unique
flagship communications and public service project that provides curated news/original content
through a blog, website and linked social platforms (such as Twitter and Facebook). UCFO highlights
important news about the broad topic of food and agriculture and adds value to the varied discussions
occurring about how to sustainably and nutritiously feed the world.
The intention of the brand is not to serve primarily as a channel for UC news, but rather to provide a
platform that gathers and convenes conversations. The brand provides a balanced perspective on
complex issues, to educate, connect and provide a public service.
Another important goal for UCFO is to increase literacy around important topics in food and
agriculture (and science literacy in general). The content is produced and curated by a Cooperative
Extension academic, who enjoys editorial freedom. To date, more than 715 blog posts have been
produced, there are nearly 7,000 Twitter followers, a growing presence on Facebook, and growing
presence on Instagram and Pinterest. Audiences include the general public, educators, academics,
legislators and media. A podcast and video content will be added in Fall 2016. The fast growth of the
UCFO brand affirms the broad public interest in the food system.
“California Matters” Video Series with Mark Bittman
UC partnered with former New York Times journalist and celebrity chef Mark Bittman to produce a
10-part video series called “California Matters,” which focuses on highlighting a range of complex
food and agricultural topics impacting California and the world. The videos feature UC researchers
whose work is compelling. For example, one video shares the work of a UC ANR researcher who
studies the cultural and ethnic dimensions of food security among Hmong farmers in California’s
University of California
Global Food Initiative
Central Valley. The public has received the videos with enthusiasm. The videos range in length from 3
to 5 minutes. Access the video series here.
Student-Produced Videos
The Experiential Learning Subcommittee commissioned the development of a series of studentproduced videos. One video explores composting at the UC Berkeley campus, another shares
information about a pepper-breeding project at UC Davis, and yet another discusses food insecurity at
the UC Riverside campus. There are ten videos in total; view them here.
Contact Information
Gale Sheean-Remotto, PMP
Program Manager, UC Global Food Initiative
Program Management Office
University of California Office of the President
1111 Franklin Street, 7327F, Oakland, CA 94607
Tel. 510.987.9837
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